Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in flexible electronic devices, in particular, wearable electronic devices. Such devices may be capable of detecting the position and or motion of part of the body of a user, thereby permitting the device to trace postures or movements, for example in a monitoring application or in a robotic application for replicating the user's movements. Alternatively, or additionally, such position and/or motion detection can be employed in a user interface, permitting a device and/or a second, remote, device to be controlled by the user's movements or gestures.
The computing resources required for such detection depends upon the complexity of the system and the number of degrees of freedom of variations monitored by the device. Where a relatively large number of sensors is used, the processing of the sensor outputs, measurement, tracing and/or reconstruction of the postures or movements may require considerable computing resources and may result in a significant delay in providing appropriate control or feedback, for example, when generating a command signal based on the determined user posture. In addition, the electronic circuitry may become complex, with a relatively large number of interconnections between the sensors and the processor.
Similar considerations may apply to touch-sensitive devices, particularly where a high degree of precision is required.